Werit reminded me today that it’s the 20th anniversary of Windows 95, the game-changing OS that lurched PCs forward. It was of course buggy and problematic — this was a Microsoft product, after all — but it was also quite significant.

I had grown up using DOS for most of my childhood, although when I purchased my first PC it came with a copy of Windows 3.0. That’s not a typo — 3.0. I got a free upgrade to Windows 3.1 a couple of months later and used that for a good three or four years. This was back when I was getting over my mistrust of mice — cursor keys were good enough for me, thank you very much — and wrapping my head around graphic menus with movable icons instead of a fixed text menu. The numbers one through 10 were good enough for me, thank you very much.

So fast-forward to 1995, my second year of college. We all had these laptops as part of some new initiative to equip every student with a computer (in 1995 it wasn’t taken for granted that everyone would have a PC), and our class being the first wave, we had these incredibly ancient, clunky machines that we loved. They ran Windows 3.1, but when Windows 95 came out we were informed that we could get a free RAM upgrade (from 4 to 8 megs!) and get the new OS. So that’s what I did.

Windows 95 wasn’t as huge of a leap as going from DOS to Windows was, but it was still a bit of a tech shock. The big feature was the new “start” button that kept all of the applications tucked away in nested menus, which was a nice change from the cluttered screen of Windows 3.1.

I liked being able to customize my desktop a bit more with Windows 95, although I probably overdid it with whatever I could find on the internet. And it wasn’t too long that we were so comfortable with 95 that going back to 3.1 was painful.